Elsa: When Fear Tells Us to Hide

 There is something about Elsa’s story in Frozen that feels completely different when I watch it as an adult. As a child, I probably would have seen a princess with magical powers who accidentally froze an entire kingdom. Now I see someone who spent most of her life believing there was a part of herself that needed to be hidden. I see a little girl who became afraid of who she was, who shut herself away from someone she loved because she believed distance would keep everyone safe, and who spent years trying desperately to control something she didn’t completely understand. The more I think about Elsa, the less her story feels like one about magic and the more it feels like one about fear.

Elsa wasn’t always afraid of her powers. When she and Anna were little, her magic was something joyful. It was something they shared. Then Elsa accidentally hurt Anna, and everything changed. Suddenly something that had brought happiness became something dangerous. Elsa learned to conceal it, control it, and most importantly, keep other people from seeing it. Somewhere along the way she stopped believing simply that her powers were dangerous and began believing there was something dangerous about her.

I think we can do that to ourselves without realizing it. Something happens to us, someone says something about us, we struggle with something other people don’t understand, or we make a mistake we cannot seem to forgive ourselves for. Eventually we stop saying, “This is something I am dealing with,” and begin believing, “This is who I am.” We allow an experience, a fear, a failure, a diagnosis, a limitation, or someone else’s opinion to become part of our identity.

And then we start hiding.

Maybe we don’t have a bedroom door like Elsa’s between ourselves and the rest of the world, but we become pretty good at building invisible ones. We say we are fine when we aren’t. We hide our anxiety, sadness, fear, exhaustion, and uncertainty. We become experts at changing the subject when conversations get too close to something tender. We convince ourselves that we are protecting the people we love by not telling them how much we are struggling.

That is exactly what Elsa believed she was doing with Anna. She loved her sister, and because she loved her, she stayed away from her. Elsa knew why the door was closed. Anna didn’t. Anna simply knew that the person she loved had stopped letting her in. I think there is something painfully real about that. Sometimes the people who love us would rather walk through something difficult beside us than be protected from it by being pushed away.

There is a line between being private and becoming isolated, and fear has a way of quietly moving that line. It tells us not to burden anyone. It tells us nobody will understand. It tells us people might see us differently if they knew what was really happening. It tells us we should be able to handle this ourselves. Eventually the walls we built to protect ourselves can become the very walls keeping love from reaching us.

Then Elsa finally reaches the moment when she cannot contain everything anymore, and she runs. For the first time she is away from expectations, responsibilities, and the constant fear of someone discovering who she really is. She can finally stop pretending. There is something incredibly freeing about watching her throw away the gloves and become completely herself.

I think that is part of why “Let It Go” resonated with so many people. There is something inside most of us that understands the desire to finally put down everyone else’s expectations. We want to let go of the need to please everyone, the pressure to appear okay, the opinions of people who don’t really know us, the impossible standards we have created for ourselves, and the exhausting belief that we must always have everything under control.

But there is something else about Elsa’s story that I didn’t really notice at first. Running away didn’t actually make her free.

Elsa builds this spectacular ice palace where she can finally be herself, but she is still alone. She has escaped the people she feared disappointing, but she hasn’t escaped the fear itself. She changed her surroundings without healing what was happening inside her. There is a difference between getting away from something and becoming free from it.

That feels like such an adult lesson to me. We can change jobs, move somewhere new, walk away from relationships, create boundaries, change our routines, or completely reinvent our lives, and sometimes those changes are necessary. But wherever we go, we still bring ourselves along. Eventually we have to deal with whatever is happening inside us too.

Elsa believed control would protect everyone, and when that failed, she believed distance would. Neither worked. What finally begins changing everything is love. That may sound like the most Disney answer possible, but there is something much deeper underneath it. Fear and love pull us in opposite directions. Fear tells us to protect ourselves. Love asks us to become vulnerable. Fear tells us to assume the worst. Love leaves room for hope. Fear tells us we have to control everything. Love reminds us that we don’t. Fear closes the door. Love keeps knocking.

Anna keeps knocking.

There is something beautiful about having someone in your life who keeps showing up at the door. Someone who doesn’t require you to have everything figured out before they love you. Someone who sees you struggling and doesn’t immediately run away. Someone who doesn’t need you to be strong, cheerful, capable, or perfectly put together all the time. Elsa spends so much of her life believing Anna needs to be protected from her when what Anna really wants is to be allowed to love her.

I wonder sometimes if we do something similar with God. We bring Him the pieces of ourselves we think are acceptable while trying to manage everything else privately. We think we need stronger faith before we come to Him. We think we should have better answers, fewer doubts, or more control over ourselves. But God already knows what is behind the door. Psalm 139 reminds me that there isn’t a part of me He doesn’t already know. He knows what frightens me, what I struggle with, what I regret, what I don’t understand, and what I am desperately trying to hold together.

Maybe faith sometimes looks like opening the door.

One of the things I love most about Elsa’s story is that the very thing she spent years believing made her dangerous eventually became something beautiful. Her powers weren’t the problem. Fear was controlling how she lived with them. The same hands capable of creating a devastating winter could also create something extraordinary.

I think there is a lesson in that too. Maybe some of the things we have spent years wishing were different about ourselves aren’t things that need to disappear. Maybe they need understanding. Maybe we need to stop seeing ourselves through the eyes of people who never understood us in the first place. Maybe something we once considered a weakness has given us compassion, sensitivity, courage, wisdom, or the ability to recognize something in another person that everyone else misses.

Elsa doesn’t become someone else at the end of Frozen, and I think that may be one of my favorite things about her story. She doesn’t lose her powers so everything can finally be okay. She remains Elsa. What changes is her relationship with the thing she feared.

Perhaps healing is sometimes like that. We don’t necessarily return to the person we were before something happened. Life changes us. Experiences change us. Difficult seasons leave something behind. Healing doesn’t always mean erasing those things and becoming our old selves again. Sometimes it means learning how to live fully as the person we are now without allowing fear to make every decision for us.

Maybe that is why Elsa means more to me as an adult. I understand the desire to protect the people you love. I understand wanting to control things because uncertainty is frightening. I understand thinking that if you can just hold everything together tightly enough, somehow everything will be okay. And I understand that eventually life teaches us there are things we simply cannot control.

Maybe real strength isn’t controlling everything. Maybe it is knowing when to loosen our grip. Maybe it is admitting when we are afraid. Maybe it is allowing people who love us to stand beside us. Maybe it is trusting God with the things we cannot fix instead of exhausting ourselves trying to fix everything.

Elsa spent years believing freedom meant getting far enough away that nobody could hurt her and she couldn’t hurt anyone else. But she eventually discovered something much more beautiful. Freedom wasn’t found in being alone. It was found in realizing she could be completely herself and still be loved.

I think there is a little bit of Elsa in many of us. There are pieces we hide, fears we manage privately, things we try desperately to control, and doors we close because somewhere along the way we decided it was safer that way. But perhaps we were never meant to spend our lives behind those doors.

Maybe the greatest freedom isn’t finally escaping everyone else’s expectations. Maybe it is reaching the place where fear no longer gets to decide who we are allowed to be. It is opening the door, stepping back into our own lives, allowing ourselves to be known, and discovering that the people who truly love us weren’t waiting for us to become someone different.

They were waiting for us to come home.